Gary M. Stern

Gary M. Stern has been the General Counsel of the National Archives and Records Administration since 1998, and is a career member of the Senior Executive Service. Mr. Stern also serves as NARA's Chief Freedom of Information Act Officer, Senior Agency Official for Privacy, and Dispute Resolution Specialist.
Mr. Stern earned his law degree in 1987 from Yale Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Journal of International Law; he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar College in 1983, where he majored in Ancient Greek.

For the three years before becoming the National Archives' General Counsel, Mr. Stern worked for the U.S. Department of Energy, where he was a senior advisor to the Secretary of Energy, a special assistant to the General Counsel, and assistant general counsel for contractor litigation. In 1994-95, Mr. Stern worked as a senior policy and research analyst for the U.S. Federal Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.

Before then, Mr. Stern worked as a staff attorney for the Washington Office of the American Civil Liberties Union, where he specialized in national security, classification, and information law issues. There, Mr. Stern participated as a plaintiff in Armstrong, et al. v. Executive Office of the President, involving White House e-mail recordkeeping practices, and also served as legal consultant to the National Academy of Science's Committee on Declassification of Information for the Environmental Remediation and Related Programs of the Department of Energy.